Over on The Arnold P. Gold Foundation's blog, Johanna Shapiro, PhD, a professor at UC Irvine School of Medicine, makes another case for letting your pre-med son or daughter major in philosophy (or sociology or art history). She writes:

To me, the most important meta-questions a future physician can engage with (preferably every day of her life) are fundamentally moral ones:

What kind of doctor do I want to be?

Who am I and who can I become within the practice of medicine?

How do dominant discourses in medicine and society influence me, my patients, and our community in negative or positive ways?

What is my commitment/responsibility/ to my patients and my community and how can I best serve them?

Arts and the humanities serve not to make you a better person, Shapiro writes, but to encourage you to continually examine and evaluate your actions - a useful course of study in any profession.

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